From Love to Justice: Families’ Interrogation of Racial State Violence

This paper explores how love, grief and kinship operate in families’ struggles for truth and justice following a death in custody of a racialised person in England and Wales. Racialised people are disproportionately vulnerable to dying in police custody. Family experiences following a custodial death are characterised by difficulty in obtaining information, delays in processes, a lack of responsiveness from authorities and an absence of resolution. Love, grief and kinship form the initial springboard for families’ legal battles for justice, with women often taking leading roles in demanding state accountability through legal action and community-based campaigns. While kinship ties have traditionally been understood in mainstream scholarship as closing off family units and mitigating against principles of egalitarianism and solidarity, families’ justice campaigns challenge this narrative. Families can become politicised in the course of struggle, forming alliances with groups proclaiming broader antiracist goals. This paper reveals the subversive potential of love, grief and kinship in struggles for justice in racialised death in custody cases.